The Big Grand Theory of Everything (or how "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" started me on the road to Retroville)

How did I become a RetroHead? This is my theory:

See, when I was a kid, there was a bit of a retro phase going on in Hollywood. From about 1988 to 1994, there were several movies released that were either aimed at young audiences or were at least appropriate for young audiences and they all dealt in one way or another with retro culture and a retro world. Many were set "back in the day" (1930s/40s/50s); many often had ties to retro culture or made reference to retro things or had a retro sensibility (kids TV shows in particular were filled with retro references). And most importantly, even though these movies and TV shows were set forty, fifty, sixty years in the past, they were meant to entertain children. In other words, when I was a kid, the world of the past (the world my grandparents grew up in) was a perfectly appropriate world in which to tell a story. There was nothing weird or highfalutin' or eccentric about telling stories to kids and setting those stories in the Depression era, or the WWII era, or the Eisenhower '50s.

Not that I've done a scientific study of the thing, but I don't believe this is really the case anymore. Most (if not all) of the current entertainment for kids is set in the present day, or the future, or if they're going to go back in time at all, (God help us) the 1970s. In other words, for kids today, the era of the "Greatest Generation" is simply not on their radar in terms of popular culture. Whereas, when I was a young gal of ten I was watching the 1990 "Dick Tracy" movie, the one set in a primary-colored 1930s world of gangsters and dames, or "Tiny Toon Adventures" with their references to "Citizen Kane" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Those eras of the past were alive to me in a way I just don't think they are for kids who grew up in the late 90s and the 2000s.